1969 "JWT Tour" Video to Resurface at Chicago Alumni Party

Alumni of JWT are gathering at the end of the month for an RIP party to mourn the passing of the agency’s Chicago office. The question on one exec’s lips is, will the “JWT Tour” video — a mock travelogue spoofing JWT’s 1969(!) move from the Wrigley building to the John Hancock Center — be shown?

The answer is yes. This blogger, who goes by the nom de plume Mrs. Linklater, says she will bring a copy. (Of course, the Chicago office was saved at the last minute by winning the Illinois lottery account, but the party seems to be going ahead anyway.)

Here’s a digest of her account of her time at JWT:

I was hired to work at the Chicago office of the J. Walter Thompson ad agency three different times. In the sixties. When the smell of ganja wafted down the halls. The seventies. When the daily sexual harassment of the sixties was finally illegal. And the eighties. When I had to raise my children by phone [No wonder they called it MA Bell].

Linklater says she doesn’t understand why the JWT Tour took on a life of its own, but thinks it has something to do with the drugs:

Usually party films have a very short life. Mostly they’re good for a single showing at a company event, where they seem a lot funnier in hindsight because everybody was drunk or stoned.

Instead of disappearing like it should have, it kept showing up in new business pitches and other presentations over the next twenty years. Until the agency moved to a different office building again.

BNET begs that a copy of this be placed on YouTube. Readers?

Image: a 1971 National Airlines ad by JWT.